Sucker Punch (2011)
Directed by Zack Snyder
A young woman, institutionalized by her abusive stepfather, retreats into a vivid fantasy world where she envisions a plan to escape. Gathering a group of fellow inmates, she embarks on a quest to collect five mystical items, blurring the lines between reality and imagination.
35 connections found
View:
35 films that influenced Sucker Punch
What critics say influenced Sucker Punch
You could say that Sucker Punch is a nymphet version of The Snake Pit or Shutter Island, or a live-action, green-screened redo of The Powerpuff Girls, or Black Swan (Carla Gugino has the demanding dance master role here) with a higher nightmare quotient, or an $82 million tribute to Jess Franco's sublimely cheesy women-in-prison movies of the '70s, or an Americanization of Norifumi Suzuki "pinky violence" melodramas (Girl Boss Guerrilla, Sex and Fury) of the same decade, or, in its backstory about a decent girl deprived of her inheritance and consigned to grow up in a prisonlike environment, a gloss on mid-19th-century classics from Jane Eyre to Little Dorrit.
A field day for schoolgirl fetishists and fanboys with a penchant for steampunk (but with Snyder's leaden dialogue, you've got to call it steamclunk), this staggering failure borrows from Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge, Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's The City of Lost Children, Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, and a variety of psych-ward melodramas from The Snake Pit to The Uninvited.
Scott Glenn is the “Wise Man” who gives “Baby Doll,” as Browning’s character is known, the marching orders for her quest.
Some tributes that come immediately to mind are The Matrix, female-in-prison movies, anything in which Sigourney Weaver kicks ass, The Matrix, Metropolis, Moulin Rouge, Shutter Island, Kill Bill, anything in which Milla Jovovich kicks ass (in particular The Fifth Element), Bad Girls, Hellboy, Sin City, and director Snyder’s own films like Watchman and 300.
A field day for schoolgirl fetishists and fanboys with a penchant for steampunk (but with Snyder's leaden dialogue, you've got to call it steamclunk), this staggering failure borrows from Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge, Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's The City of Lost Children, Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, and a variety of psych-ward melodramas from The Snake Pit to The Uninvited.
Advertisement
You could say that Sucker Punch is a nymphet version of The Snake Pit or Shutter Island, or a live-action, green-screened redo of The Powerpuff Girls, or Black Swan (Carla Gugino has the demanding dance master role here) with a higher nightmare quotient, or an $82 million tribute to Jess Franco's sublimely cheesy women-in-prison movies of the '70s, or an Americanization of Norifumi Suzuki "pinky violence" melodramas (Girl Boss Guerrilla, Sex and Fury) of the same decade, or, in its backstory about a decent girl deprived of her inheritance and consigned to grow up in a prisonlike environment, a gloss on mid-19th-century classics from Jane Eyre to Little Dorrit.
Some tributes that come immediately to mind are The Matrix, female-in-prison movies, anything in which Sigourney Weaver kicks ass, The Matrix, Metropolis, Moulin Rouge, Shutter Island, Kill Bill, anything in which Milla Jovovich kicks ass (in particular The Fifth Element), Bad Girls, Hellboy, Sin City, and director Snyder’s own films like Watchman and 300.
His star in Hollywood rose after the mega-success of 300, a panel-by-panel recreation of the Frank Miller graphic novel that took the bullet-time photography of The Matrix to a new level.
The slow-motion auteurâ??s first film not based on a pre-existing property still feels mighty reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland, The Matrix, Moulin Rouge, One Flew Over the Cuckooâ??s Nest, Cinderella, and The Lord of the Rings, all mashed together in one faux-profound, quasi-feminist blowout.
This is a notion that has been explored before in such excellent films as the aforementioned “Brazil” and the even-more-underrated “Pennies from Heaven,” that strange and sadly beautiful Dennis Potter creation in which a Depression-era sheet music salesman sees himself as the hero of a series of elaborately produced musical numbers when the pressures and disappointments of real life became too much.
What you end up with then feels like something dreamed up by a man on a cough syrup high watching a double feature of "Brazil" and "Caged Heat" wrapped around insipid koans about inner strength.
Sucker Punch's plot is, essentially, the last 10 minutes of Terry Gilliam's Brazil — had it been conceived by a deliriously hormonal teenage boy.
This is a notion that has been explored before in such excellent films as the aforementioned “Brazil” and the even-more-underrated “Pennies from Heaven,” that strange and sadly beautiful Dennis Potter creation in which a Depression-era sheet music salesman sees himself as the hero of a series of elaborately produced musical numbers when the pressures and disappointments of real life became too much.
Perhaps meaning can no longer be generated except by slamming together familiar signifiers in new way, which is why one single film can crib so freely from Brazil , One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon , Blade Runner , Moulin Rouge! , the collected works of David Carradine, the Star Wars franchise, and a hell of a lot of more elemental generic tropes from horror, sci-fi, jidaigeki, sword & sorcery fantasy, and video games galore - the most staggeringly obvious of which is Wolfenstein 3D though the last sequence, on a train, reminded me of a level in Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire to a degree that I'd have thought impossible for a game I haven't played in over a decade.
Advertisement
Laura: Cowriter (with Steve Shibuya)/director Zack Snyder (2004's "Dawn of the Dead," "Watchmen") returns to the desaturated CGI world of his Spartan epic '300' for his first original story, a women in prison film turned fantasyland videogame.
(This impressive opening sequence is scored to the Eurhythmics' '80s hit "Sweet Dreams," and you're supposed to connect the name of the asylum to the duo's lead singer, Annie Lennox.)
(She also appears on the soundtrack, channeling Metric's Emily Haines and slow-drone-moaning her way through covers like "Sweet Dreams" and "Where Is My Mind?")
All this is set to an interminable sing-song cover of Sweet Dreams, because, like, you know, she's actually in a living nightmare or some shit.
In the end, what can you say about a filmmaker who thinks nothing of laying a cover of the Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams" (lyric: "Some of them want to abuse you") over scenes of a man menacing two young girls?